Cal Henderson: Daily Routine

Slack co-founder Cal Henderson keeps it tight with a 7-hour workday, audiobook walks, and hard boundaries around family time.

Cal Henderson, the co-founder and Chief Technology of Slack — which to date, has over 12 million users and more than 119,000 paid customers across 150+ countries — only works seven hours a day, a far cry from most startup founders.

He manages this by constantly thinking about the best use of his time: “What are the things that are the most strategically important, and am I allocating my time to them correctly?”

I’m very calendar-driven. I get in, and my day is already laid out—and my week, to some extent.

Henderson wakes up at 7-7.30am every day, and told Lifehacker that he has a “very regular sleep schedule.” Mornings are spent scanning news from BBC and Reddit, checking any Slack messages that might have come in overnight, and spending time with his son.